The storytelling tradition of Kataragama speaks of secret or hidden passageways leading to and from other lokas or realms. Typically the tradition speaks of passages that lead underground, rather like Alice when she tumbles into an enchanted rabbit hole. While the possibility of discovering such gateways cannot be discounted entirely, the passage referred to is allegorical in character yet intensely real to one who undertakes the journey. With help from experienced wayfarers, the seeker studies the surface contour of his or her own immediate realm of ideation and perception. At moments of insight, habitual patterns of ideation and perception cease and older (yet fresh and new) modes of ideation present themselves. When this happens, the sadhaka percieves the world in strange and magical new ways.
The perilous passage through an Active Door or 'narrow gate' is' a common motif of folklore traditions worldwide and has been the subject of a vast literature, of which Ananda Coomaraswamy's essay "Symplegades" is arguably the best. His description of the hero who undertakes the Grail Quest also captures the essential character of the Kataragama Pada Yatra tradition:
The expert, for whom the antitheses are never absolute values but only the logical extremities of a divided form (for example, past and present of the eternal now), is not overcome by, but much rather transits their "north-and-southness" or, as we should say, "polarity," while the empiricist if crushed or devoured by the perilous alternatives (to be or not to be, etc.) that he cannot evade.
The essential story of the passage between 'Clashing Rocks,' according to Coomaraswamy, is replete with the "signs and symbols of the Quest of Life which have so often survived in oral tradition, long after they have been rationalized or romanticized by literary artists." "The distribution of the motif," he adds, "is an indication of its prehistoric antiquity."